Find a book by any word in its title

Signal Sonics carries LibriVox: thousands of books read aloud by volunteers, free and out of copyright, no account needed. Finding one used to be hard, and the reason was not your connection.

Search that starts anywhere

LibriVox’s own search only matches a title from its first letter. Type “sherlock”, “whale” or “moon” and it finds nothing unless the title starts that way. Browsing a genre took eight to thirteen seconds a shelf, and the audiobooks page shows six.

So we keep our own copy of the catalogue, refreshed every night: 22,335 books when this was written, searchable by any word in the title, the author or the description. A word from the middle of a title now finds the book, and the shelves draw from our copy instead.

Covers first

LibriVox has no covers of its own, so each one comes from the archive entry behind the book, and about 4% of books, mostly the newest, do not have one yet. Because those were also the newest, a shelf sorted by newest opened on a row of grey squares. Books with a cover now come first.

Opening a book

The list of chapters used to come straight from LibriVox every time a book was opened, and when LibriVox was busy that was slow or failed: in a test on 9 September, opening eight books at once failed 63 times out of 170.

Since 14 September the chapter lists are kept in our own copy too, for all 22,347 books it held that day. A book added after that is fetched from LibriVox the first time somebody opens it. The recordings themselves still play from LibriVox’s files on the Internet Archive.